Brazen Coons, Runaway Cows, & Substandard Ducks

There are many classic country memories - the smell of beeswax at the old country store, bidding at the stock auction, and checking out the latest tractors at the local Agway. There are many other memories - lesser known and a bit more unique.

Some mornings I’d lie in bed a while, listening to the sound of cattle & pork futures blaring on my parents’ radio. It was our redneck Wall Street stock ticker, prices fluttering up and down ever so slightly. Some mornings, though, I awoke to the sound of my dad’s shotgun. He’d be at his bedroom window, firing at the raccoons in the cornfield.

“I’m just scaring them,” he’d say as I watched him pull up his pajama bottoms. Dad had a habit of wearing clothes well after the elastic had given up the ghost, to the point that the cloth was shiny and nearly sheer. He’d fire a shot, pull up his droopy drawers, then fire again, never missing a beat.

“Don’t worry, I’m not gonna hit them,” he’d say as I stared at the spectacle. Since I never found a dead raccoon in the cornfield, I left it at that. But I sure wished he’d spring for new pajamas.

Sometimes we wouldn’t get to sleep all the way to the radio. Once in a while, in the middle of the night, the phone would ring. It would be a neighbor calling to tell us our cows were out again, munching their way through his garden. They had to be fetched back home, so at the sound of the telephone, everyone would automatically pile out of bed, into their clothes and wearily head down the road to be zombie cattle wranglers. Mercifully the cows only escaped in the summer, when the smell of the Thompson’s alfalfa down the road was too tempting to resist.

In the days just prior to a ‘jailbreak,’ I’d often catch the cows ‘working’ the fence line, literally climbing up the fence and pushing on it, trying to find the weakest spot. I lectured them about this, but they never listened. They kept on with their wicked ways, going for destructive, moonlit strolls until we came and got them. Some folks had uncles or brothers they’d retrieve from the local bar at 1 am. We had Midnight, Cindy, Sonny, and a few other rowdy, roaming cows.

“Get your furry butts home right this minute!” I’d hiss at them. I prayed this didn’t get back to my friends at school. While the town girls were probably out on dates, I was half-dressed and frumpy, standing in a field, arguing with a bovine gatecrasher.

“What’s it worth to you?” Midnight would inquire smugly. She was the leader, the shop steward of the cows. It was 1 am, and she was arguing with me.

“Get your butt home now,” I’d sigh, “Or I’ll tie you by the tulips.”

We often chained the cows to trees on the front lawn so they could eat the grass. We’d end up with large ‘mowed’ circles, complete with cowpies, and unmowed areas in between. It was an attention-grabbing look. Instead of crop circles, we had ‘crap circles.’ There was a flower bed in one area that contained mostly tulips, and I knew Midnight couldn’t stand them. She despised them, actually, not even daring to step on them, and eating all the grass neatly around them. We liked to put her there because she did such a good job, but I knew she hated it.

“Fine,” Midnight huffed, flicking her tail and sticking her tongue up her nose as she turned toward home. “I wasn’t that hungry anyway.”

Somehow word got out about my cattle wrangling skills (I blame my sister), and I was offered a job at the Dutchess County Fair. Not just any job, mind you, but a job in the baby animal tent. It was my first real employment, and being a cow-whisperer, I took it very seriously. Besides the usual feeding and pen-maintenance, I was saddled with the task of teaching baby ducks to walk up a ramp, grab a bite of food, then slide down the slide. This would be easy if baby ducks came equipped with at least the tiniest hint of a brain stem. I could push them up that ramp all day, but unless I crammed food right down their throats, they weren’t getting it. Suddenly the cows looked smart.

Early visitors to our tent did not get to witness cute, quacking ducklings waddling happily up a ramp and sliding down a slide. Instead, they were treated to a puppet show. I was the puppeteer, having my right hand shoved neatly up a baby duck’s butt, ‘walking’ it up the ramp, where my left hand would force feed some meal down its gullet as the right hand flicked it down the slick slide. The baby duck would choke a bit on its dinner as it tumbled down into the water, hopefully landing right side up. I’d wear a big smile and exclaim how cute the ducklings were as I shoved my right hand up the next duck’s butt. I’m sure quite a few of those ducks are still in therapy.

The Fair was a huge deal, almost the biggest fair in New York State. What made it so big was that it was within commuting distance of New York City. So every year, our little town was inundated with city folk intent on having a good old country time. Whether they stepped on us in the process didn’t matter – they were going to spend a day in the country admiring the local kitsch, littering, and stomping on our every word with the most bizarre accent. My parents still had a Brooklyn accent, but it was nowhere near as raucous and brazen as these urban interlopers. I was stunned. It seemed, also, that many of these urbanites were missing a key filter between their brain and their mouth. Every little thing that came out of their brain went directly out their mouth, with no processing whatsoever, much like the primitive digestive tract of a tapeworm. Suddenly the cows looked smart.

Eventually I had ‘puppeteered’ enough duck butts that the mere sight of me was enough to send the birds squawking up the ramp. One of my favorite activities was to watch the look on the city people when they noticed the effect I had on the animals. They’d stand there, jabbering away, their accents sawing at words like dull chainsaws. I’d stare at them. Once I had their attention, I’d motion to the ducklings. This was their cue to run up the ramp and do their thing. Then I’d watch the city slickers’ jaws drop. I’d give them the ‘you’re next’ look, and they’d skitter away, speechless.

Country Cookin'

To many, the term country cookin’ conjures up visions of barbequed squirrel, home-baked pie, and deep-fried whatnot. This was certainly not in our case in our house. Dad had a full-time job, plus the farm, plus a side job land-surveying. Mom had us four kids, a herd of cows, several horses, four dogs, a cat or two, a few hundred chickens, the land-surveying business, a snoopy mother-in-law, a house the size of a small European country, and my dad. When in the world was there time to bake pie?

On The Andy Griffith Show, Aunt Bee was constantly scuttling about the kitchen baking, roasting, or frying something. She was always dressed just so, everything ironed and in its place, even her double chin. That needy voice of hers bothered me, and Andy’s awkward bachelor lifestyle seemed suspicious, but that’s another story. I love home-made pie just as much as the next person, but no pie, no matter how tasty, is worth that amount of dysfunctional whining. Hand them each a bottle of Jack Daniels and just let them rip at each other once and for all. I’d watch that episode twice.

I’m sure somewhere there’s a country matriarch bustling about the stove daily, fussing over seven-course meals, but she’s either got an Easybake Oven, plastic teacups, and a teddy bear, or she’s baking fluffy cloud cakes for her roommates in the local psychiatric hospital. On a realistic, working farm, they would’ve hauled her outside, slapped a baseball cap on her, and had her stack hay bales in the barn for three hours. If she felt like stirring and spicing after that, go for it. Bye-bye, double-chin. Bye-bye, whine.

While Aunt Bee didn’t live on a farm, television watchers (aka city dwellers) were given the impression that all country folk do is sit around and bake peach cobbler. On our farm, Aunt Bee would have serious biceps, wear coveralls, and tell Opie to “cowboy up.”

Because of shows like The Andy Griffith Show, Green Acres, and Petticoat Junction, the lifestyle of the rural gourmet has been grossly misconstrued. Let’s take a look at some of the key differences:

• There’s no one person dedicated to cooking. In fact, the person who made dinner was most likely just lifting bales next to you in the hayfield. In other words, do not expect homemade pie for dessert.
  
  
• You will be expected to help. Yes, you just stacked two hundred and fifty bales of hay. Wash your hands and set the table.



• No sparkling clean kitchen here, unless you’re eating outside and it just rained. Table scraps roll downhill, and the dogs keep the floor relatively clean. Good enough until winter comes and we have time for some deep cleaning. (The coziest work in the winter is near the wood stove in the kitchen.)



• The pet you scratched behind the ear last week might now be on your plate. And he might taste pretty good. Horrible thought, right? I had trouble with that one, too. Until I tasted the chicken. It was really good.
  

This marked my introduction to what some call feminism. It was more like country common sense equality. If you could do it, then do it. If you couldn’t, you’d learn. The tractor didn’t care whether you were packing a trouser snake. Get it in gear and get the hay in, please.

On the flip side, the boys were expected to clean up and help with food and laundry. They didn’t care for it too much. So that was fun to watch.

In high school, girls took Home Economics and boys took Shop. I questioned that logic, mentioning it in passing to the principal one day. Sure enough, the next year everyone took Home Economics and Shop. While I made a few enemies that year, it was quite by accident - I never expected the principal to actually listen. I couldn’t wait to get to the real world and make some real changes. Just lasso a few flying pigs and make the world a better place. Piece of cake. Or pie.

The pizza run –
One of my favorite splurges was every Sunday night when we’d order pizza. Since we were far beyond the delivery area, we had to go fetch it. I enjoyed bringing it home, trying to get back quickly so the pizza was still nice and hot. Since there was no direct route between our house and the pizza joint, I was, for the sake of hot pizza, compelled to barrel down twisting country roads. This was as close to running moonshine as I would ever get, so I took full advantage of it. There were no police cars watching for speeding pizza runners, however, deer liked to jump out of nowhere. Swerving to avoid a deer does very bad things to pizza cheese. I’d race home in record time, only to open the pizza box to discover that the lateral g forces had had a severe, negative impact on the mozzarella. In the middle of the box, there’d be a tomatoed circle of dough. A large, frightened pile of cheese would be plastered to one side of the box. Still hot, of course.

Daddy tried -
Beyond the basic hot dogs, hamburgers, and pizza we consumed, my dad did have some interesting culinary experiments. Most dads take pride in their barbeque skills. This was BBBQ – beyond barbeque. Every once in a while he’d find an irregular recipe for cooking up homemade oddities. They always started with tremendous potential and somehow took a wrong turn. For instance:

· One year we had an over abundance of tomatoes, so he decided to make tomato sauce. Or maybe it was ketchup. Not sure which one it was supposed to be. I only knew that it was inedible. Later we discovered that our ‘Big Boy’ tomatoes weren’t the right type for canning or pickling or torturing or whatever Dad was doing to them. All I remember is staring at row upon row of mason jars full of tomato seeds, skin, pulp, and vinegar, worrying about when I’d be forced to consume their contents. Or whether the tortured tomatoes would evolve, escape, and consume me.

· Apple sauce takes lots of cooking in a big pressure cooker. If the pressure isn’t monitored and goes too high, pressure cooker parts fly in all directions, and boiling hot apple sauce follows the parts. We learned that.

· Homemade root beer was his next attempt. Absolutely flat. Not much is sadder than getting a whiff of the sweet scent of real root beer, only to be repulsed by a lack of bubbles. I wanted to find out who was giving my dad such a nutty do-it-yourself idea and knock him flat.

· The home-brewed apple cider never went flat. It did, however, distill a bit too long, eventually turning into rather potent applejack. We had to carefully remove it from the crawlspace under the house, first venting the area to release the methanol that had built up down there. I was hoping we could at least feed it to the livestock and watch them stumble around. Not much is funnier than a drunken cow slurring her words. I would be reminded of this again much later when I attended my first sorority party.

Big Red

In rural areas, city rules are bent, tweaked and twisted until they resemble country roads. Things that make sense in urban areas simply don’t apply out here. We intend to keep it that way, for good reason.

For instance, regardless of age, every able body works. If you can drive, that adds a tool to your toolbox. Suddenly you can run equipment down to the hayfield or deliver lunch to Dad when he’s cutting down trees in the back woods. Farm work tends to mature kids a bit earlier, so waiting until sixteen to learn how to drive seems just plain silly. Especially when you’re the oldest kid – Mom and Dad have been running all the errands and are anxious to put you behind the wheel. A very dented and rickety wheel, but a wheel nonetheless.

For town kids, your 16th birthday is usually the momentous day upon which your parents hire a professional company to whisk you away and teach you how to drive. The perilous, stressful business of learning to drive is administered by trained, well-medicated instructors in a well-padded, sterile environment. Mom and Dad throw some money at the issue, then go duck and cover.

In the country, there are tons of vehicles and animals upon which to practice your driving skills. After trying to get an ornery two-year-old horse to stop, finding the brakes on a car is child’s play. Your horse has already taught you a basic rule - you mess up stopping on a horse, and you will soon be sporting stitches or worse. Ye olde simple country rule – mistake=pain.

When I was about twelve, I was given an all-terrain vehicle. It was pink, had six moon tires, a massive roll bar, an earsplitting engine, and was named Maxx. It could go through nearly anything, including deep mud, water, and snowdrifts, even taking on steep hills. The butterfly choke didn’t work very well - in order to start it, you had to lean way back across the engine, putting your hand over the intake so your hand was literally the choke. Unfortunately, you had to lean directly over the exposed battery terminals, so if your arm was a bit too low and made a connection, a nasty shock would run from your elbow to your hand, now covered in fuel. That would happen only once, then you’d be more careful.

At first glance, this sounded like great fun. The only thing is, we used it more for work than anything else. Although I will admit, once you got past the chance of getting your arm shocked, being able to drive a pink ATV around was a thrill. If you ever want to keep your brothers from borrowing something of yours, get it in pink.

My first truly scary driving experience was on an International Harvester tractor. Dad let me drive “Big Red” because he said I couldn’t kill it no matter how hard I tried. It had a double-clutch that ignored my puny weight, so in order to shift, I had to jam both feet on the clutch, grip the steering wheel, and push down on the clutch with all my abdominal might. Then shift.

One day I was driving Big Red in a hayfield, nearly a full load on the hay wagon behind me, with Mom on the back stacking the bales. We were headed downhill and suddenly the old tractor’s brakes took a break. Big Red wouldn’t stop, and we were quickly running out of field. I peered back at the hay wagon, flexing and bending behind me faster and faster as we picked up speed. The bales swooped and swayed, threatening to fall off, possibly taking my mom with them. I knew she’d survive to kill me later. I yelled to her but she couldn’t hear me, probably because she was yelling at me. I tried turning Red slightly to the right, hoping to miss the trees and swamp, all the while pumping the brakes.

Tractor accidents usually look pretty ridiculous, rarely getting the respect and awe due, say, a NASCAR crash. They often occur at very low speed, with sad, silly, predictable results. A silo gets wiped out, a tractor rolls over seemingly in slow-motion to take a nap, or simply plows through an old barn as the driver bails out to safety. They’re usually more embarrassing than anything else. Especially for a young driver not weighty enough to compel the brakes to work.

Big Red lurched to the right. A few bales flew off the left side. I stood up on the cranky clutch and stomped, downshifting to slow the tractor. It was not happy, stuttering and growling, but Red did slow a bit, enough for me to turn it away from the fast-approaching trees. Eventually we rolled to a stop. I crawled off and hyper-ventilated on the ground, watching bales tumble down the hill past me.

“Are you gonna sit there all day? Let’s get this hay picked up.” Mom was apparently just fine.

Later on, when blood returned to my head, I mentioned the faulty brakes.

“Don’t be silly,” Mom said. “Your father’s never had that problem. You just need to try harder.”

The following week, Dad was hauling a full load of hay back to the barn. He was negotiating a narrow, tricky, back road when Big Red’s brakes disappeared again. The whole rig ended up jackknifed, one rear tire on the hay wagon hanging over a cliff.

The nice thing about being a grown-up is that you can send the kids home, call a friend with a big tow truck, and quietly fix your messes without anyone the wiser. And you don’t even have to try harder.

Mom's Recipe for a Traditional Holiday Meltdown

As kids, we never doubted there was a Santa. We did, however, worry that he might not make it past our parents. For some reason they were both out to get the chubby guy in the weird suit.

Dad created the lovely tradition of a Christmas Eve Bonfire for Santa. Right before bedtime he'd build the most glorious blaze in the fireplace, flames leaping and licking the top of the firepit. "Let's make it nice and warm for the fat man," he'd chuckle as he brought in more firewood, his eyes glowing red by the light of the inferno. Helpless to intervene in Santa's roasting, we kids would gloomily head off to bed, hoping against hope that Saint Nick's suit was fireproof.

But compared to our mom's traditions, Dad's meddling was child's play. In the month before Christmas, as the big day approached, Mom's temper would get shorter and shorter, and the vein on the side of her forehead would get bigger and bigger, like some sort of bizarre Advent calendar. Day by day, her desperate grip on sanity would tighten into a deadly stranglehold. She would bark orders quicker than ever, her sharp, practiced tongue clipping the ends of her words off almost before they left her mouth. I would stare, transfixed, at the vein as it popped and bobbled in time to her protestations. That may explain why I didn't hear much of what she said. The coronary traffic jam on her temple was much more interesting.

Sometimes she got so mad at us she couldn't even tell us what we did wrong. The anger would boil up in her face to the point she was speechless, and we’d stare, blinking and clueless. If we ran, we’d be cut down in our tracks. Stay and we risked mental annihilation. It was almost amusing, seeing her so mad that she nearly forgot why. But we dared not smirk, lest we found ourselves assigned to some hideous task like cleaning the chicken house, or scrubbing toilets, or the worst – scrubbing the chickens’ toilets.

Suddenly she’d remember what had piqued her anger, catch her breath, and launch into a tirade, sparks spitting from her mouth. Dogs would dive for cover, birds would make a beeline south, and we kids would scramble for an alibi or excuse or dark corner, all desperately seeking safe haven from the storm.

I figured the thought of a chubby, cheery guy dropping in uninvited, tramping soot and reindeer poo through her living room, and probably raiding the fridge must have really made Mom nuts. After all, she already had Dad for that.

About a week before the big day, as the four of us kids re-enacted our traditional holiday squabbling, she would finally come unglued. "That’s it! Santa’s NOT coming to this house this year!!!" At first we were terrified. Santa always brought the best toys. Without him, all we had were bunny-suit pajamas from Nana and educational tedium from Mom and Dad. We would do everything in our power to placate Mom, petrified that the big guy would pass us by.

Then one year we figured it out. My brother had recently given the cat a bb-gun enema. We thought for sure he'd get coal or worse. Instead, Santa brought him more ammunition. My sister had spent the entire fall semester staring oddly at classmates just to creep them out, and when Christmas rolled around, she got twenty-three dollies with stares just as creepy as hers.

I called a sibling meeting and shared my suspicions. We graphed our naughty vs. nice annuities, and compared it to our gift receivables. The truth was out – good or bad, you could set your watch by the fat man. Mom must have simply been jealous that Santa gave us cooler toys, and she was conniving enough to garner a couple weeks of household peace by pretending she could stop him from coming. The knowledge that she was bluffing was kid gold.

Still, it was scary to defy her. The first year after we knew, we at least pretended to be good. But we no longer quivered in our beds, sweating the daily errors of our ways. To be on the safe side, we carried on the family ritual of superficial fear and cordiality. When Mom raised the traditional holiday roof, we struggled to look scared, but we had found an inner peace knowing Santa didn’t listen to her. Her bombastic tirades were now merely a harmless holiday habit, much like fruitcake, only louder.

Santa made it every year without fail. Even Dad’s attempts to roast him didn’t shake us anymore. We knew the big guy would never let us down, except once, when my little brother asked for new parents. But that was probably because he forgot to say 'please.'

Thanksgiving Needs More Salt

When I was a kid, we celebrated the traditional family Thanksgiving - tons of food (lots of it home grown), an all day cooking marathon, a cool fall nip in the air, and football. Not all the best plays were in the football games:

• My mom would try to intercept my grandmother, who was intent on salting the daylights out of every dish. Nana would fake right, get a key block from a child-distraction (usually my little sister), then loft the saltshaker over the potatoes, turkey or whatever receiver was open at the time.
  
• My brother, Tom, made an end run around kitchen duties by discovering a sudden, latent interest in football. He would tiptoe into the living room, bury himself in the couch, and stare quietly at the television, hoping that his stillness would camouflage him. He would blend, forgotten, into the furniture, hoping to avoid being hauled into the culinary chaos. I would not be surprised to discover that he was still there.


• My younger sister would play ‘assistant coach' in the kitchen, messing up anything she touched, to the point Mom would shoo her off to play before she spilled any more hot gravy on the dogs or poured more cat food in the string beans. At the time I thought my sister was clueless. But now I’ve worked with adults who have perfected similar levels of incompetency. If you act like a child, continually botching projects, no one will expect you to do anything. I call it planned adolescence.


• My youngest brother guarded the temperamental oven with a fire extinguisher, in case it 'overheated,' a traditional Celtic term meaning house fire. I always wondered if its affinity to go up in flames was somehow related to excessive salt.
  
  My dad spent much of the day in the back forest cutting firewood. He would come in for a break to watch football a bit, then head back out. After a few minutes listening to our kitchen shenanigans, he quickly opted for the soothing sound of the chainsaw.
  
  Our kitchen was long, like a bowling alley. Just clearing the table involved lots of hiking back and forth. On Thanksgiving Day, when everyone was in there, including the pets, navigation was impossible. We were constantly tripping over a dog or a grandmother or both. My mom held her ground and her sanity with a bottomless glass of Gallo wine. I huddled in a corner and peeled potatoes, taking notes on a childhood that was sure to someday make me a famous writer. If I survived.
  
  Even the livestock knew something special was going on. We often fed leftovers to the horses, so through the miracle of conditioned response, whenever they caught sight of my brother with the fire extinguisher, they knew Mom was cooking and that leftovers were inevitable. Ever hear a horse whinny all day for potatoes and gravy? It’s not a pretty sound. They’d get so excited that the cows figured out something was up, and would start in as well-
  
  Midnight the cow: Moo! Moooooo!
  
  Cindy the cow: What’s up? Why all the mooing?
  
  Midnight the cow: Well, the horses are making a racket. Something about a saltshaker run amok up there in the house. Figured I’d join in.
  
  Cindy the cow: Gotcha…Moo! Mooo! …what’s a saltshaker?
  
  Sadly, there was so much noise inside the house, with my mother defending the cranberries from Nana the Crazed Saltress of Doom, and my sister shrieking that her Chatty Cathy dolly wanted to help salt things, too, that the din from our cheerleading cows was lost in the commotion.
  
  Perhaps this was why holiday tunes were invented – to blast them loudly so the neighbors couldn’t hear the real chaos going on inside the house. Perhaps that is why we lived so far out in the country, so neighbors weren’t within earshot.
  
  In any event, it was Thanksgiving, so eventually, after hours and hours of preparation, pandemonium, and excessive spicing, we all sat down in the dining room together, said Grace, and ate. For about fifteen minutes. By then we had run out of salt.

Plague of the Tourists

Every fall they came, just to stare at leaves. And shoot deer. When you live alongside nature, it’s hard to understand: one - why people travel so far to see it, and two - why they want to kill it. I’m speaking, specifically, of the he-tourist hunters and she-tourist leafers from New York City.

Maybe we only saw one side of the situation. Perhaps there was someone in New York City who needed a break from these obnoxious people and said, “Here’s a gun. Why don’t you go upstate and wander in the woods awhile? Maybe we’ll both get lucky. Oh, and take the missus. She can stare at trees and annoy the locals.”

We lived near enough to the city that we were inundated with city-idiots - it was hard to fathom why we should let certain urban dwellers live. What made it especially difficult to keep our fingers off the trigger is that tourist season corresponded closely with hunting season. So very, very tempting. And no limit on tourists!

“Officer, I was aiming for a six-point buck, but at the last moment, that old lady with the walker leaped in my way. It was just an unfortunate accident. Coulda happened to anybody.”

“Understood. Just don’t let it happen again.”

First, let me backtrack and explain my distaste. It would seem that if you were going to take up a sport as deadly as hunting, and seeing how death is somewhat final and appears to hurt a lot, it would behoove you to learn a few things about the sport first. There were basic rules concerning firearms and common sense that city folk consistently broke. For example:

• Never hunt near a road. You could spook a deer into traffic, and if a car hit it, the driver could get badly hurt. This happened to my mom – her car was totaled, and so was the soul of whatever stupid hunter sent that deer into the road, because my mother put an Irish banshee curse on him. If he’s still alive, he’s in pain, and lots of it.


• Keep your safety on, especially crossing fences. I can’t tell you how many ‘he-tourists’ shot themselves in the foot going over fences. What really surprised me is that they didn’t demand we put in ‘handicap access’ for our fences. “I shot my foot off going over your fence –put in a concrete ramp for my wheelchair, or I’ll sue.” Go ahead and laugh. Just you wait.


• Identify what it is you’re shooting before you shoot at it. Nothing like hearing a gunshot and seeing a chunk of bark fly off the tree next to you. Yes, that happened to me. Yes, he, too, received a banshee curse. Then there was the city hunter who was found ‘gutting’ a brown cow. Really. No, sir, that’s not a two-point buck – that’s a Jersey cow. Yes, you’re quite the warrior, sir. I'm sure it put up quite the fight. How now, big dummy?

The rules were there for survival’s sake. If you ignored those rules, perhaps you shouldn’t be permitted to survive. Most of the year Darwin seemed to go easy on the city-dwellers, letting them grow fat and lazy until the first frost sent them into the woods. Come hunting season, we’d avoid the forest as much as possible, bringing the horses and cows up in the pasture closest to the house. Then we’d sit back and let the city-idiots shoot at each other. We had ourselves a whole new kind of turkey shoot.

New York City couples carpooled. The he-tourist, aka hunter, would put on his shiny, bright, orange hunting gear, kiss his wife good-bye, and trespass through the nearest field, where he would promptly climb over a fence and, on a good day, shoot himself in the foot. Then he’d limp back to the road to wait for his wife, who was in town drinking lattes and staring at trees. While he was waiting, he contemplated who he could sue for his misfortune, and where he wanted his wheelchair ramp to go.

In the meantime, his wife, the typical she-tourist aka leafer/antiquer, would peruse all the over-priced detritus for sale at the antique boutiques. She’d then drive out to the countryside, park in front of our house, and brazenly steal a pair of cast iron wagon wheels off our front lawn, stuffing them into the trunk of her Cadillac. At least that’s what the she-tourist I bagged did. Poor thing – she was much too old to be hefting something that weighty into her trunk. I could see her suing us if she were injured during her theft, and I was torn between helping the spinster lift her heavy load, or twisting her arms behind her, cop style, and putting my knee into her kidneys, slamming her against the car while I handcuffed her for stealing our property.

I settled for yelling, “HEY!” She dropped her five-finger discount and scuttled back into her Cadillac, spitting gravel down our country road. I hoped she hit a he-tourist hunter on the way back into town. Or that a he-tourist shot at her car. Come on, Darwin – rise and shine, dammit!

Our hay field bordered Route 9G, a major thoroughfare. In other words, it was paved and had two real lanes. Many wayward city dwellers cruised it, pretending to gawk at the leaves changing color, but we knew they were really trolling for old crappy stuff antiques to steal.

At this time of year we’d be in a hurry to get the last hay cutting into the barn, dodging raindrops, stray bullets, and spinsters dragging stolen wagon wheels.

The leafers would park on the side road, blocking our access to the field, jabbering about lattes, and generally making pests of themselves. They were probably waiting for us to turn our backs so they could swipe our hay rake and resell it on Crazy Larry’s Staten Island Farm Equipment Black Market. Or turn it into some sort of country art artifact. Maybe it would resurface as a decorative wrought iron hanging pot holder for some bored, overpriced kitchen on Long Island. These people were downright soul-less.

Sometimes tourists would pull over to the side of the road to take pictures of us. This used to irritate the hell out of me. What were we, a freakin’ Amish zoo exhibit? I wanted to give them something special for their photo album, maybe drop my jeans and show them a real harvest moon.

My youngest brother, Bob, was in that field raking hay. He, too, had had it with the looky-loos, and decided, while still driving the tractor, to drop drawers and give them a Kodak moment. (How he came upon that idea, I'm sure I don't know, or at least I will never admit to suggesting.) Anyway, as he aimed his motoring moonpie at the startled tourists, he failed to notice a fast-approaching gopher hole. As the front left tire fell into the hole, the tractor lurched sideways, and Bob was launched into the air. Luckily, his wayward pants caught on the shift lever of the tractor or he would have rolled, half naked, under the big rear tires. As it was, he accidentally shifted gears with his belt loop, and had to pull himself back up by the steering wheel of the now speeding tractor. Grabbing the wheel like that made the tractor veer sharply, running over and crushing our brand-new handicap access wheelchair ramp for hunters.

Please don’t tell our Dad.

The Fresh Air Girl

The first thing I remember about Stephanie was her odd yet joyful habit of jumping in and out of our front door onto the grass. To a little kid from a New York City ghetto, that was apparently the greatest thing in the world. Landing on grass at her high-rise/low-income home involved a major hike and probably some risk. So as soon as she got to our house, she hopped in and hopped out, over and over and over. We’d hear the screen door banging closed again and again, and we knew Stephanie was having fun.

One of the easiest ways to figure out what you have is to be with someone who doesn’t have it. The Fresh Air Fund is a non-profit company that helps inner-city kids get out to the country for a while. They either attend a camp or stay at a private home. It’s a great program and still going strong. I guess the stories about livestock roaming our living room or giant moths attacking our dinner never made it back to the Fresh Air people, because they kept sending us kids every summer.

One thing Stephanie had that I didn’t was confidence. She would go anywhere, anytime, even at times defying my mother. Up until then I thought anyone going up against Herself would vaporize instantaneously. Not Stephanie. She had a Teflon soul. I wanted to be Steph-tough, too.

Stephanie was black. Her mom had sent instructions on how to do her hair properly, and my Mom did her best. But I still remember her frustration as she gamely attempted to put conditioner on Stephanie’s hair and turn a tidy corn row and pigtail or two on a very busy eight-year-old. Low-brow hijinks on a quiet country night. Kids don’t care about whether something is politically correct – it’s either funny or it’s not. Now that’s fresh air.

One thing Stephanie absolutely refused to do was pick crops. She had toiled as a child laborer, doing that for a living for a few summers to help pay bills. I found it fun to pick corn and dig for potatoes. I’m sure if I had to do it all day until my fingers were numb and my back ached I’d think otherwise. But at least I got to sling the slimy 'taters at my brother and flick potato bugs at my sister, so all was not lost.

Stephanie had her own priorities, soaking up the summer every minute she was with us. She was outside nearly all the time, picking flowers, climbing trees, playing with dogs, swimming in the pool. I got tired just watching her. Yet she made it pretty obvious, like only a kid could, just how much I had. Yes, it was different. Yes, I had to shovel chicken poo and heft itchy, heavy bales of hay. But I got the feeling from Stephanie's manic cavorting, that this poo-hefting and bale-pitching was something special. Smelly, perhaps, sweaty, yes, but special.

Later, during my college years, I would swing back and forth between campus life and working construction. Very early on Saturday mornings, I would literally step over my roommates' tipsy bodies to go work the first shift at a blacktop plant. Once a coworker at the plant was gloating over hitting a great garage sale the weekend before. He beamed because he was able to buy decent back-to-school clothes for his kids. At a garage sale. Meanwhile, my snoozy roomies at the university had spent three times that amount on booze the night before. Did this give me perspective? Of course. It also gave me mental whiplash.

There's something to be said for not fitting in, for riding the rail between farm and city, rich and poor. For one thing, when you perch yourself on a fence there's usually a pretty good breeze. And more than one view.

The Logistics of Converting Livestock to Pets

There's an old adage in farming that it's harder to eat an animal after you've named it. Lots of farm kids attempt to salvage a steer, goat, or pig by giving it a cute name. Sometimes it works. For instance, we named my sister and we ended up keeping her.

But most times it doesn't work. The first couple of steers we owned, Larry and Suzy, were downright evil. Yes, I'm aware 'Suzy' is a bizarre name for a steer, but they wouldn't let me name him 'Rose' after our Nana. This gender-bending of a name may have played a part in his poor attitude, but that certainly didn't give his buddy, Larry, any excuse to be rude.

Names alone were not enough to save those meanies from becoming veal parmagiana. They once chased our mother up into a tree and kept her there all day. After that, I never saw Mom tenderize beef so thoroughly. We kids soon realized that if any of our animals were going to live long enough to collect Social Security, we were going to have to take the name game a bit further.

So we not only named our farm animals, we tried to turn them into pets. For instance, we taught several of the cattle to hang out in the yard like big dogs. They learned not to cross the road or chase cars, and how to take the lid off the container of grain in the garage. My pet rooster, Chump, liked to be scratched behind the ears and would come when you called him. He wasn't quite housebroken, but his table manners were impeccable (sorry).

This pet project didn't always succeed. We often fed table scraps to the horses and cows. It's one thing to have your dog drooling patiently by the table. Quite another to have a herd staring in your kitchen window at your dinner plate-

Horse: Whinny! (You done with that?)

Cow: Moo! (Dibs on the potatoes au gratin!)

Chicken: Cluck!(Herb, is that you? Oh, my God!)

Nevertheless, we continued our furperson conversion, hoping to make them all members of our family. My dad knew exactly what we were up to. One day as I worked in the front yard, Ralph, our Black Angus steer/dog, walked by sporting chalk lines all over his body. As I looked closer, I realized the dotted lines followed the cuts of meat under his black fur. Today, Ralph was our oversized Labrador, but tomorrow....

One of my favorite moves was to sneak a steer into our house. And once we had done that a few times, we decided to up the ante and attempt the second floor. There were several key degrees of difficulty, all of which made this stunt even more exciting to pull off:

• Mom - usually in the kitchen, but wary of any strange noises. Also wary of no noise at all, since that's when we were usually doing the most damage. Sometimes a sibling was bribed to launch a distraction. Sib-bribing was dangerous in its own right, though, since now the sib had a chance to snitch on you if the need ever arose. A creative counter-story and the threat of a noogie were needed just in case someone blabbed.


• Front entryway- chosen because it was the widest and furthest from eagle-ear Mom. It was difficult to keep both the screen door open and the main wooden door open whilst rustling cattle through them without something going wrong. If the steer got hit by the door, it would usually reverse gear and attempt to fly out the nearest exit, usually located over your body. Any cowboy who's operated a loading gate at a cattle ranch has similar issues, except when they get run over, they don't also get grounded by their mom.
  
  
• Front hallway - slate floor - loud and slippery, especially if you wear hooves. To muffle the sound, we made extensive use of throw rugs, carefully leading the animal so it wouldn't step on the loud floor. If we missed the rug, the hoof 'clank' on the stone floor would give us away. Imagine the game, Operation, but on a much larger and more physically punishing scale. To this day, when I see a throw rug, it reminds me of sneaking cattle down the hallway to the stairs. And I can still hear my mom calmly calling from the kitchen, "Get that animal out of the house." Yes, good times.


• Staircase - wide, which was good, but cows are genetically stair-challenged, which is why you rarely see them in public libraries or performing in musicals. They're not keen on elevators either, but that's a story that I can't tell until the statute of limitations runs out. I can only afford so much litigation at a time.
  
  
• 180 degree rotation- in the rare event we got a steer all the way upstairs and into a room without being detected, turning the animal around without destroying anything (and making noise) was dang near impossible. If you don't believe me, try it sometime. One errant tail flick and a lamp or table bites the dust. We once got Ralph turned successfully but he then flicked his tail against the bedroom door, making a loud, cow-startling noise, which in turn made him leap forward, until he got to the staircase, which he tried to skip altogether. Cattle can't fly, at least not indoors.


• Return trip - what's harder than getting a cow upstairs? Getting it downstairs. Something about looking downward and the fear of falling. Or maybe it noticed how our beds were so much more comfy than the pasture and didn't want to go back. Cows are hinged differently from us - their rear knees are backwards - so a staircase is a mechanical challenge. Some of them tried to 'hop' down, gaining so much speed that they'd miss the turn to the front door and end up skidding into the living room. If we were lucky, the pool table stopped their forward motion. But the eventual 'thud' usually tipped my mom off that cattle were in the vicinity. At this point it was everyone for himself. Sometimes the cow was left alone to talk things over with my mom. I never had a cow rat me out, though, unlike my sister. Cows ratted her out all the time.

Fortunately we never had a steer have an accident on the carpeting. I don't know how I would've explained that one, except to blame it on my brother. Perhaps the whole holy-cow-I'm-in-the-freaking-house situation was enough for them to keep their tails tucked tightly to their bottoms.

Once a few of the steers had been successfully smuggled into and out of the house, it was time for a bigger challenge -Tara, my horse. She was young, but still the size of a young horse. Farm animals look deceptively smaller when they're outside. Get them inside next to the couch, or even better, on the couch, and you get a better perspective on size. And if caught, a better perspective on corporal punishment.

Tara was a quarter horse, called that because they typically consumed many Quarter-pounders -thereby making their rear ends the size of buses. I never realized how big she was back there until I tried to fit her butt through the front door.

Quarter horses are known for their explosive speed. This is because their back ends are composed almost exclusively of huge, explosive muscles. And a 426 HEMI. At short distances, a quarter mile or less, they are faster than thoroughbred race horses. In a doorway, they can shift from forward to backward in .008 seconds, with enough strength to tear the wood trim off a door and crush an instep. Fortunately, the blunt force was usually sufficient to throw you far enough clear of the alleged incident to make blame difficult to prove. "I couldn't have done it, Mom. I was way over in this pear tree, pickin' apples."

Like most quarter horses, Tara also possessed incredible maneuverability. Many times we'd be trotting along and she'd spy something horrifying, such as a maple leaf or blade of grass. She'd drop her head, spin her shoulder out from under me, and I'd be left hanging in mid-air like Wile E. Coyote. This happened enough that my parents finally brought in a professional horse trainer to work with her. The trainer couldn't stay on anywhere near as long as I could, and eventually gave up on taming any of us. I think my parents wanted to give up, too.

Quarter horses are also known for their brains and easy disposition. Tara was easygoing as long as she got what she wanted. Once her brain hit tilt, however, all bets were off. So the main challenge with getting her into the house was to keep her mellow. For Tara, that involved beer.

When Tara was born, we all joined her and her mom in the pasture, basking in the glow of Mother Nature and the miracle of a new life on the farm. And the very first thing Tara did was line up my dad's Miller High Life, which was sitting innocently in the grass, and kick it over. Since then she's had a thing for beer. This would come in handy when executing the old livestock-in-the-parlor trick.

I gave her a sip or two outside, then placed the beer bottle in the hallway. Tara was not happy. I opened both doors for her and waited. She swiveled her ears, pawing at the ground. She could hear my mom in the kitchen making dinner, and she perked up at that. But she was still wary about going in the house. She shoved me, knowing I was up to something. Finally, with Tara watching closely, I went in and took a sip of the beer. Her beer. She started to whinny in protest, and I had to quickly shush her by grabbing her muzzle. She pushed me out of the way and lunged for the beer in my other hand.

I backpedalled into the hallway, aiming carefully for the throw rugs. Before I knew it, Tara was inside. I gave her a sip of beer. She dribbled shamelessly. While we had momentum, I headed up the staircase with my thirsty pony.

It's amazing what some asses will do for alcohol. By now all Tara saw was the beer. I was hoping that by the time she realized where she was, she wouldn't care. We made the turn at the top of the stairs and headed for my bedroom where I gave her a nice, long drink.

Success! At least halfway, anyway. We still had the return trip to navigate. Tara slobbered Miller all over my floor and looked about happily. The door to my balcony was open and inviting. She decided to investigate. Not a good idea, and she quickly realized that the grass in the front yard was ten feet down. The beer was gone, and Tara wanted out. Now.

I had to get her away from the balcony and turned around. I clanked the empty beer bottle, hoping to get her to follow. She glared at me, then turned her attention back to the view outside. I could see her gathering her legs for a jump. She didn't seem to consider that after clearing the railing of the balcony, she had at least a fourteen foot drop to the grass. I didn't understand her logic at all until years later, after attending a few fraternity parties.

Mom: Ann! Get down here and set the table. Dinner's almost ready.

At the sound of those magic words, Tara spun around. Thank goodness my horse ran on leftovers. The problem was that she was now headed for the kitchen. If she figured out where we kept the beer we were all doomed.

She lumbered down the hallway to the staircase. She stopped for a moment, then caught the scent of pasta wafting its way up from the dinner table. Angling her butt around, she sidestepped handily down the stairs.

To the left was the front door, to the right - the kitchen. Tonight, Tara was determined to sit at the table with us. I slipped in front of her and quickly closed the door to the kitchen. We stood, nose-to-nose. She outweighed me 6-1, but she had no opposable thumb to operate the doorhandle.

Mom: Ann? Come on, I need help setting the table.

Me: I'll be right there!

Tara responded to my mom, too, but I yelled loud enough to cover her whinny. I figured I had less than a minute to de-horse the house before my mom got suspicious.

I looked up to see my youngest brother, Bob, standing in the open front door, mouth ajar, staring at Tara's butt. To be fair, that's probably all he could see from that angle. I waved the empty beer bottle at him and whispered-

Me: Is this yours?

Bob: Wha- what? No!

Me: It is if Mom catches Tara in the house. Help me!

Bob stood there, face to face with a horse's ass, wondering how old you had to be to qualify for the witness protection program.

Me: Get some grass. Hurry!

Still stunned, Bob walked outside and picked some grass. Tara turned to see. She preferred rigatoni, but the grass was in sight. I shoved her toward the door. Bob waved the grass at her and she hit a trot on the slate hallway.

Mom: Do I hear a cow in the house again?

Me: No. I was just showing Bob my tap moves.

I tapped a quick version of a shim sham riff as Tara's butt cleared the front door. Bob closed the gate, er, front door, as Mom stormed in from the kitchen.

Mom: Quit horsing around and get in here!

I flipped my brother the international symbol for noogie-warning and headed in to eat.

Growing Up Green (Acres)

Every once in a harvest moon, a couple of city people get the wild idea that they would be better off living by a babbling brook with the pretty deer and some fluffy bunnies. Whether it's a genetic mutation, a Darwinian attempt at entertainment (hey, Einstein, hold my beer and watch this), or yet another attempt at a FOX reality show, every so often it happens.

My parents are from Brooklyn, a part of New York City whose name is derived from the Indian word for "arrow broken by heavy accent." When my parents married they decided, much like the nimrods from Green Acres, to move to the countryside. I blame this decision partly on the Dodgers leaving Brooklyn. A diehard Bums fan, my dad decided that once his beloved team headed west, he might as well hang it all up, get married, and move to the 'sticks,' because his life was essentially over.

Both of their families railed against the move. "Oh, my gawd, there are Indians up there!" howled Aunt Mary.

"You'll nevah see us again!" warned Uncle Frank. (This was the same Uncle Frank who would visit us and our pool every summer for thirty-five years.)

"Are you freakin' outta your freakin' mind? Did you even check to see where the nearest deli is? You will freakin' starve!" Uncle Louie murmured. Uncle Louie wasn't our real uncle, but Brooklyn Borough regulations stated that everyone had to have at least one relative named 'Louie,' 'Vinnie,' or 'Tony.' If you didn't have one, one was provided for you at a nominal charge.

Brooklynites live by a different map. First, there are the local neighborhood landmarks consisting of the deli, bakery, corner store, and butcher. All local places are on a first name basis, for instance, Third Street Delicatessen is called Vinnie's because it was owned by Vinnie Constantino. It doesn't matter that Vinnie died twenty-three years earlier - it is Vinnie's, dammit.

Travel is by bus and subway. Routes are referred to by the letters of the train or bus - take the 'A' Line to Rockaway- for instance. A big trip involves a 'transfer,' or multiple trains and buses, maybe even to one of other boroughs of New York City. Beyond the city is the frontier town known as Yonkers, then the wilds of Indian country where my parents ended up, then Canada. We learned quickly not to tell relatives that Indians didn't really live here, because if we did, they'd be up here all the time asking us where the nearest deli was.

City people do not use standard directions such as north or south. Instead, you're told to "go to Avenue D and hang a right at Vinnie's." If you don't know that Vinnie's is actually labelled Third Street Delicatessen then you must be from freakin' Yonkers and don't deserve to live anyway.

Countryborn, I learned to tell time and direction by the sun and stars. I gave valid directions to the citidiots that attempted to visit us, but sadly, they'd get lost anyway. For color, I'd throw in 'take a left at Jimmy Joe's turnip truck' knowing full well the truck wasn't there. Jimmy Joe was serving three to five for embezzlement and not selling turnips anymore. Hee, hee, hee. With no cable television, we made our own entertainment. Ain't no hatrack on my neck, suh.

Green Acres was an amusing show. My childhood was amusing as well, mainly because I survived it. Unlike the television show, though, my childhood consisted of many trips to the emergency room. Even then it was entertaining, at least for the nurses and doctors attending to my injuries. They usually got a good chuckle out of my medical record, which included:

• bitten by horse (stitches)
• bitten by dog (stitches)
• trampled by cow (contusions)
• trampled by horse (lacerations, contusions, and a concussion if I remember correctly)
• kicked by horse (cracked ribs & an impressive double horseshoe bruise/tattoo)
• thrown by horse (severely bruised bottom and pride)
• thrown by cow (massive embarrassment)

Once (thank goodness only once), I was in the henhouse gathering eggs when a chicken hopped off a rather high nest right onto my head. As she landed, she slipped and entangled herself in my hair. Naturally the birdbrain panicked, flapping her wings in my face as her claws scraped my scalp. I couldn't get a grip on her and the weight of her body hanging off my hair bent my head almost to the ground. Make a note- when you're in a henhouse, don't fall down. The floor is incredibly nasty and slippery with....stuff.

After several long minutes of flying feathers and torn follicles, I was able to unleash the beast. Since the giggling of the emergency room staff was still ringing in my ears from my last visit, I skipped reporting this to anyone. When an incident like that goes public in a small town, just try to get a date to the prom. Nobody wants to be seen with the owner of a Girl Scouts' Chicken Attack Survivor badge.

One morning before school my mom was out back feeding our massive herd of cattle, Larry and Suzy. Yes, two whopping head of Angus. How tough could that be, right? Larry, however, was still cranky about losing his Rocky Mountain oysters and, much like many cuckolded cowboys, was determined to prove how macho he still was without them. He pawed the ground and charged at my mother and her grain bucket. A tough redhead from Brooklyn, my mother refused to relinquish the grain, opting instead to head for the nearest tree, where she remained all through breakfast. Finally my siblings and I had to head for the school bus. My dear mother, still treed by Larry, gave us a lovely Rose Queen wave from a sturdy branch, warbling, 'Have a nice day at school!'

In Algebra class, a friend asked me what I was thinking about. By then I knew better than to share the embarrassing truth, so I made something up. Never, ever tell a friend that you're wondering if your mom's still stuck in an apple tree with a fierce steer named Larry waiting below. It took me years just to tell my therapist about it.

I watched Green Acres for years, waiting patiently for them to unmask the dark side of nouveau agrarianism, but it never happened. Arnold the pig never ended up as bacon next to Sunday morning pancakes. None of their cows ever ambled by with meat cuts outlined in surveyor's chalk on their bodies. They never addressed the problem of turning a horse around in your bedroom and getting her downstairs again before your mom found out she was in the house. Serious flaws in a sitcom, if you ask me. Reality, however, kept me in stitches.